The level of granularity relates, to some extent, to your constituencies. It's likely that we interact more with government entities of various sorts than some other organizations might, so we have separate codes for "Federal Government," "Foreign Government," and "State/Local Government."
Beyond the scope of governmental entities, a few other distinctions have proven useful. CASE reports giving by corporate foundations in the corporations category rather than the foundations category, so it's generally useful to have a "Corporate Foundation" code. Depending on how your corporate/foundation team is structured, it can he helpful to distinguish Personal/Family Foundations from other foundations (the VSE also asks for this classification). Donor-Advised Funds and/or their sponsoring organizations probably warrant their own category(ies) (partly to support reporting on the VSE).
Overall, your business processes (and classifications used by reports like the VSE) should drive your coding. Should you have a separate code for, say Private Primary/Secondary Schools? If you were a non-profit that related extensively to those sorts of institutions, that may be a good idea. For other non-profits, those might just be coded in the "Other Organizations" category (to the extent that they have records for such organizations). And so on.
My US$0.02 worth; the usual disclaimers apply.
Good luck!
Alan
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Great thank you!
We have a lot of records who are employed to these types of entities and even if we don't attribute a gift to them, because we cannot, I want to be sure we are coding things correctly and following best practices.
Thank you,
Amanda
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Hello Amanda,
For entities that are related in some way to a government entity we us a constituency code of "Gov - Local/State/Fed/Tribal".
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________________________________
Good morning all,
I hope I get to meet some of you next week at AASP!
I have looked at the archives and found some discussion regarding foundations and corporations but I am trying to find the best practice in regards to how "Town of..." and "City of..." are being coded by others. In our old system we had a code of "Friend organization" - we used this for towns, cities, hospitals, schools, etc. In our new systems we have the option of 'Corporation' or 'Non-profit org'. For cities and towns it doesn't seem that they would fall under with category so I'm wondering what others so.
Also, are there any other sites people use other than guidestar.org<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fguidestar.org&data=02%7C01%7CHejnalA%40SI.EDU%7C4ee267cba62f47317aa108d7320d5fd9%7C989b5e2a14e44efe93b78cdd5fc5d11c%7C0%7C0%7C637032905340405205&sdata=z4tj9J6NRcjZy2Vn33JreT35CYcRFOMYrzFFwE9UCoc%3D&reserved=0> or is this the best resource?
Thank you in advance,
Amanda
Amanda L. Haney
Assistant Director of Gift Management
Gift & Data Management
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